girlgeniusfandomcom-20200214-history
Forum:New Wikia Format
__NEWSECTIONLINK__ Format change As Wikia users are generally aware, there will be changes to the way pages are formatted on Wikia on the 20th of this month. I turned on the preview of the new format temporarily. The column on the left of the page, with the shout box, the menu for the wiki, and the latest activity box, are all gone with the new format. Thus, to have this content survive, at least on the main page, it will be necessary to change its format, apparently. Either that, or there may still be some bugs in the new format as it is being offered for preview. --Quadibloc 01:55, October 17, 2010 (UTC) : Well, we weren't really using the shout box that much. At least part of the menu for the wiki is now along the top. And the recent activity box appears on most pages. So I think things are not as bad as they first appear. Not to say it couldn't use more work beyond the colors, logo, and background image I slapped together. ⚙Zarchne 15:27, October 17, 2010 (UTC) My usual browser is Firefox. I went to Internet Explorer, but I was unable to log in; there was "a problem with my login session", which had to be terminated to prevent "session hijacking". Hoewever, I was able to view the new format from Safari, and the same problem is present there. --Quadibloc 02:09, October 17, 2010 (UTC) : You should take that to the wikia.com help forums, that's beyond our control. Argadi 10:33, October 17, 2010 (UTC) ---- What is bothering me most about the format change is the loss of our colors and our branding. The warm browns give the page its feel and the stark whiteness of the new format is as if we have been bleached. AFAICT the content is still actually there. The Left sidebar is now a horizontal menu bar on a white background. Mousing over causes the sub-menus to drop down. The cascading menus seem to be lost however. The replacement background tile needs to co-ordinate with the rest of our colors. A solid dark brown square would be better than the present salmon texture. Our GG menu-bar needs some background color. So too does the tool bar below it. Both should probably stand out from the text around it. So they each seem like bars rather than text on a background. It would be really good if we could incorperate the GirlGeniusWiki logo that we have been using for so long into the design. If someone has a clean copy of the logos background without the text, that could become our background tile. Then have the text lengthened and all on one line to fit the horizontal bar. The current replacement looks good at its natural size but not so good when any scaling is applied to it. So I am infavor of adapting the old logo. IMO wikia is moving too fast with this. The promised theme manager is no where in sight and I don't see where we or any other folk have time to learn how to deal with the changes being forced upon us. --Rej :On that last point, look for "My Tools" at the bottom right of the screen, and there should be a "Theme Designer" entry. ⚙Zarchne 14:30, October 19, 2010 (UTC) :: Found it. --Rej :I'm working on making a clean copy of the logo, vector-based so we can easily adjust the size. --Undomelin 16:08, October 24, 2010 (UTC) ::Ok, take a look. Oops, I just realized you said without the text. (And I spent so much time carefully tracing the words! ;_; ) Oh, wait... is this for the same background as the gears and wood below? ::Oh dear, I really should read more carefully/thoroughly... ::Oh well, perhaps the ones I did will come in handy for something else... --Undomelin 02:58, October 25, 2010 (UTC) ---- Theme Experiment #1 Okay, playing with just what I found in the theme designer I have rearranged things more to my liking. *Untiled the background texture for now. This leaves the background color for most of what is visible. :::What I was going for was leather. Presumably you would prefer gears filling the background, if anything. :::: Solid color is okay. The gears were just a thought. I can't form an opinion unless I actually have tried it. *Changed the page color to the comfortable warm yellow. :::I had already made it match the old color (faf9ea) but if you like it even darker, I'm okay. :::: I couldn't quite tell whether you had or it was white. The light yellow was the closest the editor offered me. I really want an eye dropper for doing color. The theme editor makes real customization hard. *Changed the button color to dark green. It seemed to go with the rest. :::That's fine. *Removed the word mark graphic for now. Made the word mark large. *Kept the link color blue for now. *Made a wordmark based on our traditionaly icon. :::I don't think gears shaped like that will turn. And, I've never really liked that icon, but I won't argue that my replacement was much better. ::::Smooshing the icon was as much as I could do on short notice. Maybe someone will offer an improvement. *Smooshed the traditional icon into a page graphic. Graphic does not tile the screen. **The smooshing was so the icon appeared clear on my firefox browser screen. I can't tell how it will appear to others. **Usually I show my screens with a magnification that makes the point moot since I can't see the graphic. :::I think I'll just turn off the background graphic for now. ::::I tried that. It worked okay. I put the icon back because I thought it important to steal thunder from wikia's wordmark which seemed much to prominent. I won't complain if you remove it. Unfortunately our work mark is colored as a link, which makes it blue not really good for us. So the next thing is to make a word mark graphic that looks okay. I think I can just squash the traditional icon as a start. So on my list is a new background tile probably just a single color pixel. And a word mark graphic hopefully an adaption of the traditional icon to 250X65 unless a better idea comes along. Then experiment with custom hex for the colors. But first I need a color chart to guide choices. It would be good if the theme designer would let you use an eyedropper to pick up color from the screen. :: Ha. Managed to adopt the icon to my needs for both word mark and site logo. By leaving the logo untiled I still have the brown background when it can be seen. So that leave fine tweaking of the link and button colors maybe. --Rej ¤¤? 20:03, October 19, 2010 (UTC) Quaddibloc wasn't the old theme your doing? Any ideas here? :::I fear the graphical elements were largely Mnenyver's work. :::: Ah. Others are welcome to play or comment. I'm just doing this to see if I could obviate my complaints. So far I consider this only partial success. --Rej ¤¤? 18:50, October 19, 2010 (UTC) :::⚙Zarchne 00:55, October 20, 2010 (UTC) ::::Thanks ⚙Zarchne for the feedback --Rej ¤¤? 06:35, October 20, 2010 (UTC) ---- User navigation between sandboxes and their talk page The links to do this seem to have been over looked or well hidden. *I have contacted Wikia about this. *Then I made Template:UserNav to work around the problem. --Rej ¤¤? 05:36, October 21, 2010 (UTC) Gears-and-wood This is a possible candidate for a background tile. At this size it adds texture w/o calling too much attention to itself. I gave it a try. And find I couldn't decide to use it, but I want to give others a chance to evaluate it too. The vertical black lines are an artifact of my attempts at hand tiling and do not appear when the tile is used as site background. Currently my thought is to shock (myself and others) as little as possible by the transition to the new look. Staying with a solid brown background is closer to the old "transition". Once my anger at all the new behaviors has died down, it might be fun to experiment with the opportunity presented by the change. --Rej 20:58, October 21, 2010 (UTC) Link Color Blue does not look right with steam-punk browns and yellows so am trying the offered gold color ##AA5500. Extra nutmeg less butter I'm a Again anyone is welcome to comment or way in by way of their own experiments. Part of the difficulty at the moment is that I can't get access to inbetween colors to see what looks good. A limitation of the theme editor design. --Rej ¤¤? 01:27, October 22, 2010 (UTC) : There's a big problem with link colors — there's no difference between visited and non-visited links. This is especially an issue for the "recent changes" page as I actually need to remember what I've read. At one point I was told this is a "bug" with the new format and not a design decision (but it hasn't been fixed). I have no idea if we have control over this. Argadi 08:03, October 22, 2010 (UTC) 20:58, October 21, 2010 (UTC) Currently anonymous users see the monaco skin. Logged in users have had their preferences changed to the new look. As of 21:17, October 22, 2010 (UTC) the new look is what everyone sees when not logged in. --Rej ¤¤? 21:17, October 22, 2010 (UTC) Infoboxen broken? See e.g. The Black Heterodyne. In Template:Character class="hiddenStructure" doesn't hide table cells anymore. I copied your template for my own wikia, so I'd like to know if you guys come up with a fix. Grue3 14:20, October 22, 2010 (UTC) :Grue3, thanks for pointing this out. The infobox we use relied on the css to "hide structure". That method had been deprecated a while back. So I imagine that the current starter pages ( points to there) will have a working form. We never upgraded because it wasn't broken before. Alas, no longer. --Rej ¤¤? 21:27, October 22, 2010 (UTC) Experiments User:Rej_Maddog/tc/Device contains my current attempts at modernizing the infoboxes. Using http://templates.wikia.com/index.php?title=Template:Infobox_advanced&action=edit#EditPage for reference. The good news is that the unused lines can be hidden. The current hang up is I can't seem to figure out how to get a visible 1px border. I can't figure out what tells wikia what colors are to be used. The rose colored box background is its idea. It may even be giving us a yellow border which is washed out in the now yellower background. Tests are in my User:Rej_Maddog/Sandbox#Info box tests sandbox Update 05:58, October 25, 2010 (UTC) Things have gone well enough that I have redone all four info boxes in my test space. Everything seems to be working. The actual rollout is best done when I'm fresh so that will be another day or two before I get to it. Should be no problem though (famous last words). --Rej ¤¤? 05:58, October 25, 2010 (UTC) 01:21, October 27, 2010 (UTC) Rollout completed. Afaik everything works as one would want. Let me know if anything fails in actual use. I did run into a small problem with blank images. So I fixed that by adding another if statement. Eventually it would be nice to use File:Placeholder to put a button up where a picture wants to be. Unfortunately it only works as a standalone on the page. In the info box it fails because info boxes are pre-formated. I have written to wikia about the problem. Maybe they can fix it. --Rej ¤¤? 01:21, October 27, 2010 (UTC) New Background In honor of the Castle coming back on line the Gearswirl background from the steampunk wallpaper site has been added. See File:Wiki-background for the details. --Rej ¤¤? 21:10, March 13, 2011 (UTC) :I like! =) —Undomelin ✉ 05:31, March 14, 2011 (UTC) Visited links The theme manager insisted on setting the same color for visited and unvisited links. I have been experimenting trying to fix that. Mostly the experiments hadn't been working. Till now. So the visited links are distinctive in an annoying pinkish way. I hadn't paid much attention to which different color I had picked. Thats next. --Rej ¤¤? 20:01, March 19, 2011 (UTC) : Thank you — I much prefer color distinctions (even ugly colors), but I hadn't made time to experiment. Argadi 23:01, March 19, 2011 (UTC) :: Verdigris seemed like the right color for visited links. Anyone with a better idea is free to try but this will contrast appropriately with untarnished brass. --Rej 06:19, March 20, 2011 (UTC)